Mt. Moosilauke (1910) - Respite
". . . Our thought may be occupied in the hour with what a week's respite taught. This world is one part solid or fixed, and several parts change. There is very little about it to us fixed. The surface is nearly four-fifths fluid, which is forever ebbing and flowing, and the restless sea has disciples among the inhabitants of the land who are usually moving in some way, and in the atmosphere engirting our globe is perpetual change. Our life is made up of work and rest, of starting and stopping, of action and cessation.
The pastor was disposed to conform to the general and manifest order, and left the flat lot of daily duty in Vermont for the hills and valleys of recreation in New Hampshire. As shortly after the convention of churches as practicable, he started for Mt. Moosilauke, of whose fame he had heard as possibly the finest point of view in New England. The rainy season had set in, but he knew it would not last forever - he could trust the order of change.
The days of sunshine were being followed by the rain, this to be followed again by the sunshine. He went to Warren, and thence to Merrill's Mountain Home, which is on the slope 1700 feet above the sea. Many of the dwellers in the cities becoming, in the summer, visitors at Nature's attractive shrines, here were to be found some of them. We waited three days for the rain to cease; we tried to be patient, for rain was needed.
There was opportunity to cultivate the acquaintance of our fellow-beings and to read. How amiable are people when resigned; when sharing only their essence. We came very close to each other three times, at least, a day in that act which has in association the augmented meaning of friendship and mutual good will. Enemies never eat together. They could not remain enemies and do it. About the board of nurture the members of a family are bound by the strongest ties. It could not have been otherwise than that from the most ancient times those who broke bread together considered that they entered into some compact of friendship.
Across the table from me was a young lawyer of Haverhill, Mass., with his wife; to my side sat his father, a successful manufacturer of Amesbury, who; at the age of about three-score years and ten, is an enthusiastic mountain climber, and who, in his love of nature that abides fresh and fair amid all its changes, is keeping young in spirit and sympathy. He had come with three sons and their families, or with as many of them as might accompany him, some to stay for two or three days, and the remainder of them one week. He had been there just thirty years before, and returned to renew acquaintance with the host, esteemed for his goodness, and to introduce the family which had grown up about him to the quiet beauty of the place and to the grandeur of the high sentinel of that whole region. . . ."
From "On Moosilauke" by Charles Chambers Conner, pp. 486-495, The Moosilaukee Reader (Vol.2). ©1999.
